Georgia’s Lingering Shadows
The author reflects on the country’s, and her family’s, past
W hen a special forces unit arrived to disperse the protesters in front of the Georgian Parliament on a brisk evening in March 2023, my dad was urgently making calls to find out what was about to happen. I was standing in the middle of the crowd, with the Georgian flag clutched in one hand and an air horn in the other. My friends and I were protesting a “foreign agent” law, modeled off Russia’s, that would restrict and censor certain kinds of civil activity. We had gathered that morning in front of Parliament to voice our disapproval. Then I started receiving texts from my dad. He told me that the riot team was about to start clearing the protest with rubber bullets, water cannons, and tear gas. His friends, their personalities secret to me, were the ones who gave him the warning. I gathered what friends I could find and left the area, though many of them stayed behind to continue the fight.
My friends and I have an ongoing joke that we spend every summer vacationing in front of the Parliament. Our government is pro-Russian, and we often protested their actions. My parents, however worried they were, never objected. They have always encouraged me to be an active citizen; they were once very active themselves.
My parents were born in the mid-1970s in what was still the Soviet Union. They came from very different family backgrounds. My mother’s father was a factory director and Communist true believer; my father’s mother was a dentist, and much less attached to Soviet power. They were teenagers when the Soviet Union started falling apart. My mother found herself dealing with her mother’s passing while trying to make ends meet at a time of extreme shortage and chaos. My dad, Gia, on the other hand, was about to go fight a war against the Russians.
My parents’ differences became more apparent as I got older. They were opposing forces: my dad was always loud and playful, but also harsh and mercurial in nature. My mom, conversely, was calm and contained. Growing up, I felt like there were many stories I wasn’t told and a past I didn’t understand. I was in kindergarten when my dad told me to hit someone with a rock if they bullied me again. I was seven when he almost beat someone up with a baseball bat in front of my eyes (the guy had cut him off on the road). And it wasn’t just my dad. Violence was all around. When I was fifteen, a guy I knew was found in the bathroom of my high school. He was beaten so brutally that my friend who caught sight of him getting transferred to the doctor’s office couldn’t tell who he was.
I always knew that my dad was in the war, the one that a newly independent Georgia fought and lost against Russian irregulars in Abkhazia, though I didn’t understand the implications. He never liked to talk about it, creating a barrier in our relationship when I wanted to know more about him, why he is the way he is, what he has been through.
My mom, on the other hand, would always tell me stories from her childhood. They were innocent, by comparison. Her upbringing was more privileged. Her stories were always fun to hear, involving childish adventures. Her darkest stories were about the lack of gas and electricity in the ’90s.
For the most part, by the time I was coming of age, this was all ancient history. My parents had worked hard, and we eventually moved into an apartment in downtown Tbilisi. My mom worked at a bank; my father worked in IT. They were able to send me to a private school in Tbilisi, where I learned English, Russian, and German. They changed as the country changed. But whatever good things happened, my parents didn’t trust them. When they were able to, they sent me to the US for college. And they do not want me to come back.
T he collapse of the Soviet Union meant a degree of transformation in all aspects of life in Georgia. Essentially left with no governing system in place, the country had to realign politically, culturally, and socially. After the multi-party elections in May 1991, the newly elected president, Zviad Gamsakhurdia, struggled to hold onto power. There were shortages of food, gas, and electricity even in the big cities. Money had no value. Armed groups formed in the cities, staking out territory and seeking political power. On top of that, in early 1991, war broke out in South Ossetia; the next year, war broke out in Abkhazia as well.
Abkhaz nationalists had existed and pushed for an ethno-state at different points throughout history, but the Abkhaz were in the minority in the region, and it took Russia’s involvement to escalate the situation. As they would later do in Eastern Ukraine in 2014, Russian agents armed and encouraged Abkhaz separatists and sent armed groups from other parts of Russia to help them. On the Georgian side, the war was fought by a disorganized national military alongside various nationalist paramilitary groups. The largest of these was called Mkhedrioni (“Horsemen,” in Georgian); it had been founded in the late 1980s by the charismatic gangster and playwright Jaba Ioseliani, in part to face off against irregular formations in Abkhazia and South Ossetia. As a result of the war in Abkhazia, more than two hundred thousand Abkhaz Georgians, the majority of the population, had to flee their homes. A Red Cross study from 1999 cited by Alexandros Petersen, a writer who specialized in Euroasian geopolitics before his death, revealed that “ninety percent of Abkhazians and forty-two percent of Georgians experienced ‘negative effects’ of the conflict, including the killing or rape of relatives, the looting or destruction of homes, or being taken prisoner.” In the end, Georgian forces had to withdraw from the region, which remains in limbo decades later, not as a part of Georgia, but not entirely sovereign, either.
Parallel to the war, the situation was getting dire in the rest of the country. In early 1992, amid widespread shortages, Gamsakhurdia was forced out of office, in large part by Mkhedrioni, who endorsed former Soviet foreign minister Eduard Sheverdnadze in his place. Gamsakhurdia fled to Armenia, Azerbaijan, and later Western Georgia and continued an insurgency until late 1993. The result of all this fighting, according to historians, was that paramilitary groups continued to exercise an outsized influence on Georgian politics for years to come.
The history of the 1990s is not only an intricate spider web impossible to navigate, but also remains largely undocumented and underreported. Davit Zurabishvili, who dedicated the majority of his adult life to politics, served as a parliament reporter for a leading newspaper during the mid-’90s. He recently told me about the time he wrote a critical analysis on Mkhedrioni, which triggered a raid of the publication, an event so frequent that the newspaper maintained its own armed defense. The proliferation of armed factions across the country sowed chaos, as there was no structural organization or a centralized military authority.
For years, it was a daily occurrence to see people getting robbed or even shot on the streets. A 1993 New York Times article by international correspondent, Raymond Bonner, included the following description of a day in the life in Kutaisi, a small city in western Georgia. “It is hard to exaggerate the level of lawlessness here,” Bonner wrote.
One Saturday afternoon, in the leaf-covered square in Kutaisi, a disagreement broke out between two men. Shots were fired. “It quickly escalated to a fusillade, people scurried for cover, and in an instant, it seemed as if there was a gun in the hands of every male in sight,” Bonner recalls.
“It happens all the time,” a passer-by said.
My dad once told me a story about this time period that has always stuck with me. Someone was shot in the chest right in front of him, only for the shooter to realize he shot the wrong person. “I will never forget how casually he apologized to the shot person on the ground for a mistake, and walked away,” he said.
For Zurabishvili, the armed groups, like Mkhedrioni, were a big part of the problem. “They were like leeches to the country’s economy,” he said. They extorted many businesses, to the point of forcing them to close; the only ones that could remain open “were perpetually occupied by army personnel.”
Mkhedrioni was responsible for perpetuating a certain violent culture in an already shattered country. Its leader, Ioseliani, was a former theater professor and an intellectual, author of many plays and books. People admired his character and humor. He was also a violent criminal.
Zurabishvili believes the war in Abkhazia failed to unify the country over a shared cause, precisely because of Mkhedrioni’s overpowering presence. When the war erupted, people faced a choice: enlist independently, or join the ranks of Mkhedrioni, fighting as part of their collective. The overwhelming number of Mkhedrioni combatants led many to view the conflict not as their own, but as a vendetta waged by the gang. The harm they caused was so egregious that in certain regions of the country, such as Samegrelo, where they burnt down villages in the name of democracy, not a single word of praise could be murmured for them.
“Mkhedrioni created the base for criminal romanticization,” theorized Zurabishvili. While he believes the rise of such groups is impossible now and the youth is slowly progressing, the mentality they spread can still be seen in Georgia.
I n August 1992, when the war broke out in Abkhazia, my dad was sixteen. He already had guns, as they were easier to get than basic necessities. My grandma’s efforts to hide his guns under her pillow were unsuccessful. Mkhedrioni members were recruiting teens by offering ammunition, protection, and, most importantly, clout among peers. “Being a member at the time meant you were courageous, cool, you had guns, and answered to no one,” said my dad.
During the rebellion against Gamsahurdia, the streets were filled with chaos and arms. Jaba was briefly arrested and imprisoned, but his men broke him out. After returning to freedom, he went back to fighting. My father said that Russian tanks had not yet evacuated Tbilisi. “You could bring a box of vodka bottles to Russians in exchange for the tanks, and they would just give them up. Or hundreds of guns, whatever you wanted, anything for vodka,” my father said.
My mom, who lived in Tbilisi at the time of the civil war, remembers the “curfew, robberies, people getting stabbed, crime.” She told me, “It was unsafe to be outside. We didn’t even go to school our senior year. People getting kidnapped, cars being stolen. Nobody wore jewelry because it’d attract thieves.” People spent hours in line to buy bread, only for Mkhedrioni members to show up with heavy artillery and steal all of it. Because of my grandpa’s high status in the Communist world, he knew all the factory directors, securing bread, flour, and sugar, all of the ingredients for my mom to bake cakes, something most people only dreamt about.
My mom, humble and soft-spoken, would tell me about all the things she collected in secret. As I grew older, the timbre of the stories shifted. Once filled with stories of childish mischievousness and carefree adventures, they gradually darkened into accounts of fear and adult burdens. The realization that my family now perceived me as more than just a child came when, one day, brimming with anticipation for new stories, I asked my mother and aunt to share some of their adventures I had yet to hear. Instead of light-hearted reminiscences, they began to recount the difficult days when they cared for my aunt’s mom after she had been in an accident. Because of the chaos in the city, even hospital patients were not safe. My mom, aunt, and uncle, all of them underage at the time, “had to physically be there and make sure she got the meds and the shots and other treatment administered.” My mother said, “We took turns staying nights because it was a frequent occurrence for patients to get robbed, especially for morphine.”
Some stories were so dark that I only got to hear them when I started working on this story. In Georgia, there’s a rich tradition of the Supra, a grand feast with food, wine, family, and friends, all accompanied by music and dancing. I remember being a child, too young to even pinpoint my age, at a Supra hosted in my uncle’s summer home. Amidst the revelry, everyone, including my mother, enjoyed their wine, when suddenly she began to cry, her tears breaking through as she struggled to contain them. It was the mention of my grandmother that had pierced her composure. As she explained to me years later, the pain of losing a parent at fifteen is harrowing in itself; what I had not grasped was the added trauma she endured from mourning in a country that was in of itself falling apart.
“The funeral was so hard to organize,” she said. “Our relatives who lived outside of Tbilisi had to walk twenty-four hours to come, there was no transportation.” Through my grandfather’s connections, everything went okay, and they even managed to get a coffin. Most people at the time were buried in rugs. “There was just… nothing,” said my mom.
In the midst of turmoil in the capital, Russia activated separatist groups in Abkhazia, intent on annexing the territory. It didn’t take long for my dad, who was a mischievous kid and a complicated teenager, to be swept up in the fervor of war. In those days, societal norms branded you either a fierce gang affiliate or a “mommy’s boy” — a label designed to shame those who shunned violence. Seduced by the allure of unrestrained power and the accessibility of weaponry, my father aligned himself with the Mkhedrioni.
As conflict escalated, the Mkhedrioni began deploying its ranks to the front lines. Their leader, Jaba, was on the front lines with boys barely past childhood.
Abkhazia was once one of the most beloved parts of the country. Cradled between palm-studded beaches and looming mountain ranges, it offered a view both diverse and beguiling. This once idyllic setting, a yearly summer retreat for both my parents, had transformed dramatically by the time war invaded its shores. Seeing his favorite places demolished and ravaged by war was jarring and traumatizing, especially for a teenage boy.
“Both Georgians and Abkhazians were engaging in extreme violence,” he told me, his voice faltering. “It was chaotic, everyone fighting for different reasons. No one had any control over what was going on.”
I n my early years, the figure of my father loomed large. He had enlisted in the war at sixteen — this fact alone rendered him a hero in my young imagination. To me, he always seemed wrapped in a kind of stark, impenetrable coolness. He blasted music and TV on full volume, a quality I thought made him fun. In reality, limonka, the Russian nickname for F1 grenade, had once exploded so close to him that he partially lost hearing in his left ear. At the same time, to me he was the epitome of safety; his stories of the time period, a certain confidence that he exuded, imbued me with a sense of invincibility. Even when he was the one instilling fear in me, I still knew he would always protect me from outside harms.
But with age came understanding, and with understanding, a poignant awareness of the deeper, less visible battles he had fought — the kind that left enduring marks not on the body, but on the psyche.
Today, I have to scramble just to get fragments of what transpired. I remember fear flickering in his eyes after he told me about his former ties to Mkhedrioni, anxious that the truth might spark contempt. Most of the stories he tells me these days involve his friends, conspicuously omitting himself. I know he spent four months in the war–not long for peacetime, but a long time for a war. Luckily, he was rotated out to Tbilisi just three days before Abkhazia’s fall. This spared him from a brutal assault by pro-Russian armed formations that claimed hundreds of lives. According to him, no one had foreseen that the end was so near. “I was supposed to go back in a week, but it was too late.” He was lucky, he thinks, but also unlucky. “The things I saw, I hope I never see them again. I think I have been overprotective of you my whole life, trying to avoid any pain coming your way because of the things my generation experienced during that time.”
I was a freshman in high school when I developed a crush that embodied the “old boy” archetype — a group of men that pride themselves on taking offense from no one, being courageous, and exuding certain dominance over others by their superior strength. He was tall, masculine, only wore dark-colored shirts, dark blue Armani jeans, and black sneakers. He always sported a buzzcut. One day, my friends and I started hearing rumors that there was a fight brewing. A gang of high school boys from a neighboring district were coming to a stadium nearby to fight the boys from our school.
My friends and I decided to hang around to witness the unfolding drama. What we saw, in retrospect an incredibly concerning scene, thrilled us beyond logic. Dozens of boys, a monochrome sea of matching outfits and identical buzzcuts, had gathered for the confrontation. We were instructed not to follow them, but we were needed for the aftermath. I vividly remember seeing my friends beaten up, their faces bruised and swollen. One required stitches after getting hit in the eye with a brick.
This scene was far from surprising to me. Over the years, I have witnessed altercations of similar or even greater severity. While the former president, Mikheil Saakashvili, tried to eradicate this culture by removing so-called “thieves-in-law,” the Soviet-era mafia, their influence lingered in the mentality of many. After Saakashvili, known for his own erratic behavior and violence, was replaced by the new government in 2012, pro-Russian and ’90s-resembling sentiments resurfaced.
In Georgia, violence is romanticized, often imperceptible to those unfamiliar with the cultural nuances. While women and tourists may experience a semblance of safety, the men who cling to the “old boy” stereotypes, ascribing to themselves the same potent authority once wielded by members of the Mkhedrioni, continue to cling to violence even today.
As a significant portion of the country strives to move on from the violent history, enduring stereotypes — born from Soviet-era glorifications of crime and later solidified by the dominance of militia groups — still cast a grim allure for young boys. This merely prompts a continual cycle of violence. Politicians continue to engage in physical fights in Parliament. Admired cultural figures are always ready to fight even at the most minor offense. Doing anything different is a sign of weakness.
In December 2017, a particularly harrowing incident occurred in Tbilisi: two high school students were fatally stabbed. Although stabbings are common, it felt like this particular tragedy captured the entire country’s heart. Amidst the widespread grief and shock, what remained indelibly in my mind was the reaction of those who had long endorsed this brutal behavior. Online, they expressed the most profound surprise, oblivious to their own role in nurturing and upholding the behavior that resulted in a tragedy.
M y dad often says we grew up together. My parents were twenty-four when they had me. Though it always irked me when he said it — while being a young parent has its perks, maybe he should have been more mature before taking on the responsibility of fatherhood — I now see what he meant. Today my dad is a calm, composed, loving man, who, to everyone’s surprise, brings along his tiny dog wherever he goes and gets mad if anyone raises their voice enough to disturb him. When I was growing up, he was the complete opposite. I witnessed the undercurrents of violence that permeated his every action. Our bonding time was spent at the shooting range. Anytime a car horn blared as he drove, I was consumed by anxiety, my mind racing with visions of him escalating to a physical altercation. His very presence, the tone of his voice, all bore the imprints of a violence deeply ingrained within him.
Witnessing this transformation has left me wondering: if a man who once personified violence, ruthlessness, and fear can evolve into a figure of gentleness and affection, might there be hope for the rest of our nation? I’m not sure. He is only one man, whose involvement in the civil war spanned only a brief chapter of his life. He was young enough to not be a high-ranking Mkhedrioni member and smart enough to leave when he did. He pivoted to IT, building a career for himself.
If he seemed proud of his past in the first decade or so of my life, the last decade has revealed the weight of shame he carries. It flickers in his eyes each time I try to get him to tell me stories from the ’90s, overtaken by the fear that the truth might turn me against him. The name Mkhedrioni stirs such deep-seated anger in Georgia that the mere mention of it breeds instant hatred. When he told me about his former ties to the group, it was a delicate conversation and in the days that followed, he repeatedly asked whether this revelation had altered my perception of him. Yet, I have never judged him for his actions in the ’90s. If anything, it breaks my heart to think about the childhood that was stolen from him.
I am an only child, and it often surprises people that my parents have no desire for my return to Georgia. The pervasive violence has so deeply colored my notion of home that, by senior year of high school, I was counting down the days until I would leave for college. Yet, once I left, I found that Georgia’s imprint on me was indelible. I grew up hearing that there wasn’t a patch of land in our country that hadn’t been sanctified by the blood of our ancestors. Later in life, I came face to face with the bloodshed myself during protests. Many of my friends, the same ones who stood beside me in those crowds, have since moved abroad, propelled by their parents’ encouragement and fear.
Those who remained are still there, a year later, protesting the “foreign agents” law amid the relentless assault of rubber bullets, tear gas, water cannons, and the unspeakable brutality of the special forces. In the days that I spend in New York, away from my people who are sacrificing themselves for Georgia, much like my parents’ generation did, I realize there is no other place I’d rather live.
